news
Flatpak, Ubuntu Upselling, and Home Assistant
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Fedora Family / IBM
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LWN ☛ The future of Flatpak
At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.
I was not able to attend LAS in person or watch it live-streamed, so I watched the YouTube video of the talk. The slides are available from the talk page. Wick is a member of the GNOME Project and a Red Hat employee who works on ""all kinds of desktop plumbing"", including Flatpak and desktop portals.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu ☛ Simplify security maintenance and compliance with Ubuntu Pro auto-attach for LXD guests
With the latest LXD release, Ubuntu Pro supports auto-attachment for LXD guest instances, offering organizations a seamless way to extend Ubuntu Pro benefits across their infrastructure.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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LWN ☛ A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: general impressions
Those of us who have spent our lives playing with computers naturally see the appeal of deploying them though the home for both data acquisition and automation. But many of us who have watched the evolution of the technology industry are increasingly unwilling to entrust critical household functions to cloud-based servers run by companies that may not have our best interests at heart. The Apache-licensed Home Assistant project offers a welcome alternative: locally controlled automation with free software. This two-part series covers roughly a year of Home Assistant use, starting with a set of overall observations about the project.
This is not the first time that LWN has looked at this project, of course; this review gives a snapshot of what Home Assistant looked like five years ago, while this 2023 article gives a good overview of the project's history, governance, and overall direction. I will endeavor to not duplicate that material here.
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